How the Media Wove a Narrative of North Korean Nuclear Deception

Since
the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Trump and North Korean
leader Kim Jong Un, the US media has woven a misleading narrative that both
past and post-summit North Korean actions indicate an intent to deceive
the US about its willingness to denuclearize. The so-called intelligence
that formed the basis of these stories was fed to reporters by individuals
within the administration pushing their own agenda.

The Case of theSecret Uranium Enrichment Sites

In late June and early July, a series of press stories portrayed a North
Korean policy of deceiving the United States by keeping what were said to
be undeclared uranium enrichment sites secret from the United States. The
stories were published just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing
for the first meetings with North Korean officials to begin implementing
the Singapore Summit Declaration.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production
of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months –
and that Kim Jong UN may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions
in nuclear talks with the Trump administration.

NBC News reporters quoted one official as saying, “There is absolutely
unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the US” They further reported
that the intelligence assessment “concludes that there is more than one secret
site” for enrichment.

The story was highly problematic because it reported the alleged conclusion
of the intelligence report as a fact, even though it admitted that NBC
reporters had not seen or been briefed in detail on any part of the
intelligence assessment in question, but had relied entirely on general
statements by unnamed officials. Furthermore, none of the officials on whom
they relied were identified as members of the intelligence community.

Significantly, the story did not indicate whether the assessment was endorsed
by the entire US intelligence community or – as turned out to be the case – only
one element of it. Normal journalistic practice would have made clear that
NBC was passing on an unconfirmed conclusion the accuracy of which
they were unable to verify. Instead, the NBC reporters played up
the alleged conclusion as unambiguous evidence that US intelligence believed
the North Koreans intended to deceive the United States by maintaining secret
enrichment facilities under a future agreement with the United States.

The Washington Post published a
report by national security and intelligence reporters Ellen Nakashima
and Joby Warrick the day after the NBC story that paralleled its
main thrust and cited the same unnamed intelligence sources that were cited
in the NBC story. But the Post also revealed that the
intelligence assessment in question had come from the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA), which is generally recognized as an outlier within the intelligence
community on most assessments of adversary capabilities and intentions.
A former senior intelligence official with extensive experience dealing
with DIA assessments explained in an interview with this writer that the
DIA “would tend to put a worse-case spin” on any analysis of North Korean
intentions.

That makes it all the more important to know whether the rest of the intelligence
community agrees with the reported assessment of North Korean intentions.
Nakashima and Warrick seemed to suggest that there is no doubt in the intelligence
community that the North Koreans “have operated a secret underground enrichment
site known as Kangsong,” and they linked to an earlier Post report
on that alleged secret enrichment site published May 25.

That earlier Post story quoted a former senior US official as
saying that intelligence agencies had “long suspected the existence of such
a facility” and believed there were “probably” others as well. But a PowerPoint
on the Kangsong issue by David Albright, the founder and CEO of the
Institute for Science and International Security, makes it clear that US
intelligence lacks hard evidence to support such suspicions. Albright, a
former UN weapons inspector, revealed that the original allegation of the
secret enrichment plant had come from a North Korean defector who said he
had “worked near the site,” clearly implying that he had inferred the purpose
of the site without having been inside it.

More importantly, according to Albright, “we have not located this site,”
meaning that the US intelligence community still did not have a specific
location for the suspected plant eight years after the defector was obviously
asked to provide it. Albright further disclosed that some US intelligence
analysts and senior officials of at least one foreign government have challenged
the belief that the building in question was an enrichment site, because,
“some aspects of the building are not consistent with a centrifuge plant.”
And he recalled that other alleged covert enrichment facilities had been
suggested to his organization, but that he viewed them as “less credible
than the information about Kangsong.”

The intelligence community appears to have even less basis for claiming
a secret North Korean nuclear site – much less multiple secret sites – today
than it did when the US government charged that North Korea had a secret
nuclear facility in mid-1998. That was when the Clinton administration informed
congressional leaders and the South Korean government privately that
US intelligence analysts were convinced that a site with tunnels carved
into a mountain at Kumchang-ri was intended to house a new reactor and plutonium
reprocessing center, based on satellite photographs and other intelligence.

After months of negotiations, the North finally agreed to US on-site inspections
in June 1999 and again in May 2000. The result of those two inspections
was that the US government was compelled to acknowledge
that the purpose of the tunnel complex at Kumchang-ri had been to vent fumes
from an underground uranium milling plant.

At least the intelligence community had identified a specific site in 1998
that it regarded with suspicion, which is not the case today. Nevertheless,
a group of officials is promoting the idea that North Korea is planning
to keep such sites secret under a negotiated agreement. The timing of the
leaked intelligence assessment that prompted these stories suggested that
someone in the Trump administration was seeking to sway the White House
to adopt the tougher US stance in Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang in early July.
Albright appeared to be referring to that effort when he told the Post
that intelligence assessment came just when “there’s a worry that the
Trump administration may go soft, and accept a deal that focuses on Yongbyon
and forgets about these other sites.”

National security adviser John Bolton had been reported
as pushing for a hard line in diplomatic talks with North Korea that
would threaten their viability. These reports raise the obvious possibility
that the officials who conveyed the alleged intelligence conclusion were
part of a political effort coordinated with him.

Hyping Yongbyon Improvements to Discredit Diplomacy

During the same time period as the reporting on alleged secret sites, NBC
News, CNN and the Wall Street Journal all reported
on North Korea making
rapid upgrades to its nuclear weapons complex at Yongbyon and expanding
its missile production program – all at the very moment when Trump and
Kim were agreeing on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at their Singapore
Summit.

In each case, the reports cited analyses of commercial satellite imagery
from independent analysts, including contributors to 38 North.
But they all employed a common device to create a false narrative about
the negotiations with North Korea: by misrepresenting the diplomatic context
in which the satellite images were collected, they drew political conclusions
about North Korean strategy that were unwarranted.

The series of stories involved more than a mere misunderstanding of the
raw information being reported. They all denigrated the idea of negotiating
with North Korea on the grounds that it cannot be trusted. The NBC News
and CNN stories on improvements at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific
Research Center cited the analysis of satellite images published
by 38 North on June 26. And they were all slanted to lead readers
to conclude that the improvements in question signified a nefarious intention
by North Korea to deceive the Trump administration.

The headline of the June 27 NBC News story asked, “If North Korea
is denuclearizing, why is it expanding a nuclear research center?” And it warned
that North Korea “continues to make improvements to a major nuclear facility,
raising questions about President Donald Trump’s claim that Kim Jong UN has
agreed to disarm, independent experts tell NBC News.”

CNN’s story about the same images declared
that there were “troubling signs” that North Korea was making “improvements”
or “upgrades” at a “rapid pace” to its nuclear facilities, some of which
it said were carried out after the Trump-Kim summit. It cited one
facility that had produced plutonium in the past that had been upgraded,
despite Kim’s alleged promise to Trump to draw down his nuclear arsenal.

Both the NBC and CBS stories were misrepresenting the
significance of the improvements described in the 38 North analysis.
They either ignored or sought to discredit the carefully-worded caveat in
that assessment, which cautioned that the continued work at the Yongbyon
facility “should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s
pledge to denuclearize.”

The analysis was referring to the fact that the Singapore Summit’s joint
statement did not commit North Korea to immediately halt its activities
in their nuclear and missile programs and therefore the improvements at
Yongbyon had no bearing on whether Pyongyang would agree to denuclearization.
Indeed, during the negotiation of US-Soviet and US-Russian arms control
agreements, both sides continued to build weapons until the agreement was
completed. It should not have come as a surprise, therefore, that work at
Yongbyon was continuing.

NBC News deliberately ignored these crucial contextual facts and
instead selectively reported statements from other analysts dismissing the
notion that North Korea would ever denuclearize and would continue to try
to deceive the US about its true intentions.

On July 1, a few days after those stories appeared, the Wall Street
Journalheadlined,
“New satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons
programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” The lead paragraph
called it a “major expansion of a key missile-manufacturing plant.”

The images of a North Korean solid-fuel missile manufacturing facility at Hamhung
showed that new buildings had been added to the facility beginning in the early
spring, after Kim Jong UN had called for more production of solid-fuel rocket
engines and warhead tips last August. The exterior construction of some buildings
was completed “around the time” of the Trump-Kim summit meeting, according to
the analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the
Middlebury Institute of International Studies. The Center’s David Schmerler
told the Journal, “The expansion of production infrastructure for North
Korea’s solid missile infrastructure probably suggests that Kim Jong UN does
not intend to abandon his nuclear and missile programs.”

The improvements in North Korea’s infrastructure for missile parts manufacturing
documented by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which began
well before the summit, are hardly evidence against North Korea’s willingness
to negotiate a comprehensive agreement with the United States. Like any
country dealing with a serious military threat from an adversary, North
Korea is both hedging against the real possibility of talks failing and
signaling that it is not unilaterally surrendering. The United States is
doing the same thing, albeit in different ways.

Conclusion

Major media reporting on what is alleged to be intelligence and photographic
evidence that North Korea intends to deceive the United States in negotiations
on denuclearization has been extraordinarily misleading. It has blithely
ignored serious issues surrounding the alleged intelligence conclusions
and suggested that North Korea has demonstrated bad faith by failing to
halt all nuclear and missile-related activities.

Recent stories do not reflect actual evidence of covert facilities, but
rather deep suspicions of North Korean intentions within the intelligence
community that have been fed to the media by individuals within the administration
who are unhappy with the direction of the president’s North Korea policy
following the Singapore Summit. And breathless reports on improvements in
North Korean nuclear and missile facilities ignore the distinction between
a summit statement and a final deal with North Korea. They have thus obscured
the reality that the fate of the negotiations depends not only North Korean
policy but on the willingness of the United States to make changes in its
policy toward the DPRK and the Korean Peninsula that past administrations
have all been reluctant to make.

These stories also underscore a broader problem with media coverage of the
US-North Korean negotiations: a strong underlying bias toward the view that
it is futile to negotiate with North Korea. The latest stories have constructed
a dark narrative of North Korean deception that is not based on verified facts.
If this narrative is not rebutted or corrected, it could shift public opinion – which
has been overwhelmingly
favorable to negotiations with North Korea – against such a policy.